Samsung is feeling confident that it can ship more handsets than Nokia this year, making it pretty much the top mobile phone company in the world.
The South Korean firm has already surpassed Apple as the world's biggest smartphone maker, so if it can overtake Nokia in all handsets, it will take the lead in the competitive field …

Obviously

Well for a start, their new Winphones are getting generally very good reviews, and secondly, they haven't been on sale long enough to turn around Nokia's sales figures yet. Thirdly, their contract with MS precludes them from making Android phones anyway.

its not they nokia thought it was dumb.

Smartphones are becoming the default

With increasing mob phone processing power Android is making headway into the cheaper, formerly 'non-smart' market. I wonder how long the cheap segment will remain free from Android: the hardware is only getting cheaper and focusing on Android would save companies from having to use Symbian or their own non-smart phone OS.

Check Gartner's numbers: Nokia's sales are dropping rapidly, from 28.2% market share a year ago to 23.9% last quarter. Android's smartphone market share more than doubled from 25.3% to 52.5%.

And despite El Reg's WinPhone marketing fluff, I don't see how Nokia will be able to turn the tide. We're quickly heading towards an Android world with Samsung comfortably in the lead.

you won't get access to updates directly from MS unless your carrier says so and they won't say so because they don't make any money from a free os update, their interest is to push you to PAY and change your phone... this is a quote from a comment there:

<quote>

They have no intentions on rolling out the update.

They very kindly asked me if I (and for that matter the other 3 members of my family who have the same phones) would like to terminate our contracts and get shiny new Nokia phones where they would be pushing the update out on to at a cost of £350.00 per phone which makes a stagering total of £1400.

@G2

I read through the blog post from the WinPhone Team. I can't believe the "The update, available to all carriers that request it". For those of us that were Winmobe users in the past and remember the bad old days, that's the most inflammatory comment that could have been made. (in voice of Comic book guy) "Worst blog post ever". The comments over there are getting vicious...

The carrier driven update issue is the exact SAME mistake MS made with WinMobe previously. I had a phone stuck on WM5 because of the carrier... Pissed me off big time. On the good side, that got me searching for how to fix it, and I joined the XDA community. The firmware available from the excellent "chefs" there mitigated the problem and got me decent uncluttered firmware at the same time which ran much better than MS/Carrier/HTC defaults. Why MS/HTC couldn't figure out how to make good firmware (with their own sw and hw respectively) is beyond me though...

I thought MS were supposed to be in control of the firmware on "their" phones now like Apple C'mon MS, you've got a whole new batch of users now, don't screw them over the same way you screwed us previous Winmobe users. Jeeeeesh

Calm down, there has been no change to the update policy, the blogg post worded it wrong. Carriers can block only the latest update, they then have to push it out when the next one comes along, that has always been the way. Bearing in mind this is a bugfix, carriers would be a bit dim to not push it. This info comes to you courtesy of an official Microsoft statement on the matter.

@Jim

You sound suspiciously like someone working at or for Microsoft. Especially since most of the posts you've ever made were regarding WinPho7. You've also made quite a few posts in Android/IOS threads, where you've been eagerly trying to point out the flaws of the two systems.

re Not so much 'nicked'

Hehe. Yeah. I can't help but wonder if Samsung has been helped into the front by the near limitless free advertising of Apple's lawsuits combined with producing some pretty beefy hardware to match. I personally expected it to be HTC or Motorola taking it, but Samsung has nearly come out of nowhere from my vantage point. Last year I wouldn't have owned one (Samsung who?), and today I've got three in the family. Fortunes change quick in this biz... It *could* be Huawei this time next year for all we know.

Those former Symbian owners

had to go somewhere for their next upgrade - seeing as they seem to prefer Android to iOS or WP7, someone like Samsung was the obvious beneficiary.

Not sure how Nokia will manage to survive on the crumbs they will be picking up from WP7 once the vast majority of their Symbian customers have made the transition to Android. Such a shame, as MeeGo-Harmattan was the *perfect* upgrade for former Symbian users.

Nokia's plan is to migrate their massive featurephone userbase to WP, eventually, as the hardware costs come down. This is why MS have reduced the entry-level specs and brought out the Tango version of WP to allow much cheaper phones to use the OS.

As usual, you're wrong Jim

Nokia plan to continue shipping S40 devices, migrating those users to a new, smarter but still feature phone OS. Nokia feature phones are not going away.
However, current users of feature phones that migrate to smartphones - now that's a different issue. Nokia hopes these users will migrate to WP7, out of loyalty to Nokia, but given how many Symbian users I know that walked, no - ran - away from Nokia once the end of Symbian had been announced I don't think you can count on brand loyalty too much, unless it's out of ignorance in which case WP7 might pick up a few sales.